The editors of Comparative Legal History (CLH), the official publication of the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH), want to remind you that ESCLH Members receive a free subscription of the journal.The latest volume is with the printers now. Sign up for membership, or renew your existing membership, immediately in order to get it soon.And spread the word and ask your library to stock us!!

20 May 2014

The French Society for International Law has created an online "Hall of Fame" of international lawyers. The project aims to bring Big French Names of international law to a broader audience of jurists.

The Legal History Blog signals a new paper by Markus D. Dubber (Toronto), "Histories of Crime and Criminal Justice and the Historical Analysis of Criminal Law", in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice (Paul Knepper & Anja Johansen, eds.).

19 May 2014

Professor Christopher Tomlins

Toward a Soterial-Legal History of the Turner Rebellion'

22 May 2014 - 3:00 - 5:00pm

Room 100, Law Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

The Turner Rebellion, which took place in August 1831 in Virginia, is well known as one of the bloodiest slave revolts in antebellum America. The history of the rebellion is dominated by one document, a 24 page pamphlet entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner written by a local attorney, Thomas Ruffin Gray, based on jailhouse conversations with Turner. By the time they met, Gray had already accumulated considerable independent knowledge of the events of the rebellion, and the second half of The Confessions, a blow-by-blow narrative of the rebellion, bears his mark. But the first half is quite different, dwelling on Turner’s life from his birth until the rebellion, matters of which Gray could have had little independent knowledge. Its central motif is the ascent of a severely ascetic personality to a state of religious grace and the consequences attending that outcome.

This lecture counterposes Gray and Turner, treating Gray as the bearer of a “disenchanting” positivist rationality that discounts Turner’s “soterial” (pertaining to salvation) account of his motivation. It describes the Turner Rebellion as a fracture in the social-historical and socio-legal normalization of the world (a normalization that Thomas Ruffin Gray laboured hard to restore in the rebellion’s wake). It argues that such fractures grant us access to new orderings of the phenomena with which as scholars we concern ourselves. In this case, a soterial-legal history uncovers realms of human motivation and action that socio-legal history cannot explain, laying bare a theological metaphysics at work in an American history and law that we have been taught to think of in determinedly atheological terms.

10.40 Thomas Du Four, chercheur à l’Ecole Royale Militaire à Bruxelles
The legacy of the fall of the Belgian forts in 1914: an introduction to post-
war inquiries, sanctioning and their career-altering effects on captured
Belgian officers

05 May 2014

The University of Vienna hosts a conference on "Law Addressing Diversity" in Europa and India, 1200-1800AD (source: HSozUKult).

“Diversity in Unity – Unity in Diversity” has been quoted frequently to
characterize both Europe’s and India’s pre-modern societies. The
phenomena this phrase attempts to describe were as diverse as the people
involved and ranged from acculturation, entanglement and co-existence
to segregation, expulsion and elimination. In our workshop, we intend to
apply a distinctive perspective by putting the focus on legal experts
and their texts. Neither in Europe nor in India were those with legal
expertise a coherent group with a uniform background, formation or job
description. Different forms of legislation, legal practice, court
procedure, legal education, profession, and law enforcement existed in
both regions throughout the period from 1200 to 1800. Instead of
equality before the law, a legal pluralism was practiced, where specific
legal traditions and modes of jurisdiction were assigned to specific
social groups. Legal experts, therefore, had to operate within a matrix
of legal cultures that matched societal diversity. Law and legal
practice on the one hand mirrored societal complexity, and on the other
were means to categorize and shape complex societies.

We are glad to announce that the Third Biennial ESCLH Conference, Traditions and Changes, will be held on July 8-9, 2014 at the University of Macerata (Italy).

In the fantastic Italian environment of Le Marche region, participants will share new perspectives in the field of Comparative Legal History.

Call for papers

The European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) – founded in 2009 – continues to highlight and promote the comparison of legal ideas and legal institutions across different national juridical fields. Following the second ESCHL Conference held at Amsterdam VU University (2012) dedicated to “Definitions and Challenges”, the third ESCHL Conference will take place on 8-9 July 2014 in Macerata (Italy) and will be hosted by the University of Macerata. Under the heading “Traditions and changes” the Conference will develop a theme which is integral part of the challenges of comparative legal history.

Members of legal history and comparative law networks share an important and paradigm-challenging reflection on the concept of legal tradition. This concern blends skills and disciplines, such as the legal, social and historical perspectives in an attempt to understand law and how it changes.

The conference would like to encourage scholars to use the comparative-historical approach for working on the complex concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘change’, both separately and in correlation. This aim raises several questions. What do we think is tradition? How is it made up, how is it ‘built’ or ‘invented’? How does it relate to concepts like recollections, historical store-room, juridical experience, legal culture, legal system? What does a tradition help, why and how is it used to promote or, on the contrary, to reject changes and transformations? Is tradition a synonym of ‘past’ and is change a synonym of ‘future’? Or instead does a dialectic prevail which can, at times, unite or separate tradition and change? What role do jurists and doctrine carry on in this field?